


Knife

by machine_dove



Series: Mirror [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Bucky Barnes is a life-ruining murderkitten, Fairy Tale Elements, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-17
Updated: 2015-09-17
Packaged: 2018-04-21 06:54:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,868
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4819457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/machine_dove/pseuds/machine_dove
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky falls, but he doesn’t die.  His heart beats on, and pain becomes a constant, along with harsh, unfamiliar voices and the sharp scent of antiseptic.  He burns, but with ice this time instead of fire.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Knife

Bucky falls, but he doesn’t die.  His heart beats on, and pain becomes a constant, along with harsh, unfamiliar voices and the sharp scent of antiseptic.  He burns, but with ice this time instead of fire.

The pain wasn’t the worst of it, the horrible white sharp flood that filled his head and washed him away bit by bit, waves breaking over a fragile shore.  No, the worst of it was the lurch in his chest when the world returned each time, the aching loss of something he could no longer name.

In his chest his heart freezes, and it’s easier to let go, to stop fighting, to let the waves wash over and around the tiny, frozen core of his identity.  And then the only things that exist are orders, and cold, and the sharp crack of a rifle.

 

* * *

He’s in Wakanda when it changes, and while the deviation is within standard parameters, it still causes a moment of distraction.  And even a moment of distraction is too much in Wakanda, where remaining undiscovered requires all of his considerable skill and a degree of luck that would make him uncomfortable if he were still capable of feeling such a thing.

After successful mission completion, he reports the deviation during the debrief.  Orders, of course - the Asset is to report any deviations from the operational baseline.  The handler laughs, a mocking note in his voice.

“We’re in fucking Wakanda, it’s like hell itself.  Of course you’re fucking hot.”

The contempt in his voice is thick enough for the Asset to notice.  It’s part of what he was made for, noticing things.  Emotions are more of a challenge than lines of sight or behavioral tells, but not impossible to read.  The Asset makes no further mention of the deviation, but he knows to account for standard environmental variables, and this was something different.  In his chest, his heart starts to thaw.

 

* * *

His target is smart, smarter than most, but he still leaves enough of a trail for the Soldier to follow.  It’s led him here to this rooftop, watching the apartment where the target has gone to ground.  He knows enough that he doesn’t turn on any lights to cast revealing shadows, doesn’t pass in front of open windows.  But he can’t stop his heart from beating, his blood from pumping - that’s the Soldier’s job.  The Soldier watches the subtle motions from inside the room, shadows layered on other shadows, calculates height and distance and angles of deflection before taking his shot.  

Target eliminated, the Soldier waits barely a breath to start moving to the extraction point when someone explodes out of the apartment, moving impossibly fast and bridging the distance between the buildings like it’s nothing.  Pursuit was not a variable he had planned on for this mission, but plans are made to be changed in response to field conditions.  He tracks his pursuer’s path by the sounds, crunching drywall and shattering glass beneath him somewhere on a lower floor.  The pursuit is fast, as fast as the Soldier, and he is unable to make a clean escape in time.  There are three possible escape paths, and he calculates that if he can disable or distract the pursuit for a few seconds he should be able to make a clean getaway and avoid further pursuit using two of them.

He stops, prepared for combat but feeling something else.  He’s not sure what, it’s nothing he has a name for, nothing any of his briefings has covered, but it’s like a tremor in the cold place in his chest, like anticipation, like one of those things that were washed away by the chair but still sometimes whisper at him like phantoms.  His pursuer flings a disc (“A shield,” something inside him says), and it’s the opportunity he needs to make a clean escape, to vanish like the ghost his handlers sometimes call him.  He catches it, flings it back, and is gone before his throw connects.

As he runs, he can’t help but feel he’s left behind something important.

 

* * *

He is meant to be a ghost, but his handlers have mandated swift mission completion and given him a team.  They’re useless as anything but a distraction, but he’ll use the tools he has.  The first target, the leak, is eliminated quickly almost before they even know he’s there.  Hunting is what he does, what he’s made for - a knife in the dark, the quick flash of fangs that ends a life.  This mission, in broad daylight with witnesses and cameras that prove he exists, is somehow wrong, but he cannot question the orders.  He’s not allowed to, not allowed to even consider it..  He has been given his mission and the timeline, and it’s his job to complete it.

The second target is fast, and smart, and her allies are more than a match for the team he’s been given.  He shoots her, goes in for the kill, but suddenly  he is there, the Captain, all blue eyes and stubborn fire and the pain from the blow to his face that breaks the mask is almost an afterthought compared to what he  feels .

“Bucky?”  

The... deviation is back, a burning in his chest, but worse this time, so much worse.  “Who the hell is Bucky?” he asks, as ghosts flit into view and the pain comes.  Not the honest pain of battle and bloodshed but a deep aching hurt that his training hasn’t prepared him for, pain that doesn’t stem from an injury but is somehow radiating from his chest nonetheless.  He can’t ignore it, can’t work through it, he can only feel it and behind it is a flood of emotion he doesn’t have names for anymore, doesn’t have the context left to understand, and so he responds in the only way he knows how, with bloodshed and violence.

And then it’s over, the targets taken prisoner, the orders given to stand down and withdraw.  But the pain?  The pain stays.

 

* * *

He’s there, in the chair where he goes to die, but his mind for once is full; full of noise, full of chaos, full of blue eyes and blonde hair and a man with a heart too big for his body, frail/strong and heartbreakingly  familiar .  Impossible.

He sees...something.  The man, reaching out for him as he falls.  Pain.  Ice.  A child, frail but fierce, who didn’t know the meaning of compromise.

“The man on the bridge...who was he?”

His handler responds, but his words are meaningless.  Truth, but also a lie.  Ghosts whisper across his field of vision, hints of something more, echoes of children laughing and the explosions of mortars.  “I knew him.”

In front of him, his handler sits, but the Asset hardly sees him.  He has blue eyes, but they’re wrong, and in the wrong face.  Words wash over him, sharp and scorching, cold and inconsequential.  Words war with ghosts, leaving behind only one solid, true, shining truth.

“But I knew him.”

“Prep him.”  He knows what’s coming, knows better than to fight it, knows that nothing he can do will stop the ice and the pain and the blankness, but still he struggles to hold on to that one true thing amidst the knife-sharp waves of agony.  His heart  burns in his chest.   I knew him ...

 

* * *

He’s down, pinned under a strut, and he can’t move, can’t get free.  Even with the added strength of his mechanical arm he doesn’t have the leverage, and the target’s gotten the chip in place, he’s failed to meet the primary mission objective, and the target is approaching and he  can’t get free .  But then, inexplicably, impossibly, the target is approaching, and instead of terminating him is lifting the strut, freeing him, looking at him like he’s the entire world and not death incarnate.  

“You know me.”

“No, I don’t!”  He doesn’t, he can’t.  He’s an empty vessel, a tool, a weapon in someone else’s hands and not someone who knows and can be known.  He lashes out, feelings finding outlet in the only way he remembers.  

“Bucky, you’ve known me your whole life.”

He’s the Soldier, he doesn’t have a life.  He has missions, and orders, and the sharp crack of a rifle.  He has pain, and rage, and confusion.  He has a burning in his chest where his heart once beat, a burning under the layers of ice that feels like drowning all over again.

“Your name is James Buchanan Barnes.”

He doesn’t have a name.  He’s a weapon, and weapons don’t need names.  Only targets, but targets don’t wield words like blades, cutting deeper than any bullet.  “Shut up!” he roars, but the man keeps talking, the cacophony in his head grows louder, and his fists are doing nothing to quiet the clamor.  

In front of him, the man takes off his helmet, drops his shield off the edge of the carrier, defenseless in more ways than one.  His eyes burn, shining with conviction as he says “I’m not going to fight you.  You’re my friend.”

It doesn’t make  sense , nothing fits, and the asset lashes out again and again, ineffectual hits that connect but won’t disable the target.   Pointless , he thinks.   Stupid.  Damn punk doesn’t know how to stay down , but he doesn’t know where those words came from, or why they hurt so much, so all he can do is lash out again and again.  “You’re my mission!”

“Then finish it.”

And he could.  So easily, it would be over, the sharp, cutting words would stop, and the world would make sense again.  But he’s frozen, not like when he’s put away between missions, but frozen in the sense that he can’t make himself move.  His mission is  right there , weak and open and vulnerable, so close to being broken, but in his chest is a burning ache.  

“Cause I’m with you ‘til the end of the line.”

The ghost-visions that have been dancing around them for the entire fight solidify then, feelings and memories and the bone-deep conviction that this man before him isn’t just his mission but is instead his entire fucking world hitting him with all the force of a freight train (like the one he fell from).  His heart lurches in his chest, free to beat once more, standing in front of him bruised and bloody and impossibly alive.  He’s scarcely had a moment to even start to processing it all, entire fucking lifetimes shoved back into his head where before there were only targeting equations and orders and targets, when the helicarrier lurches.

And then he’s the one falling this time, the mission,  Steve , and it’s Bucky who has no choice but to go after him, because he made that choice when he was just a kid and he’s never looked back.  And so, for a second time, Bucky falls for Steve’s sake, and for a second time he has no regrets, because he knows, knows in his  bones , that a world without Steve isn’t one he wants to live in (again?).

He falls, and he lives, and he leaves his heart beating and breathing and miraculously still alive on the bank behind him.

**Author's Note:**

> There will be a third part to this, but the form of it is kicking my tail so it may take a bit. But it WILL end happily, really. I swear. We just have to get through the harder bits first. Feedback GREATLY appreciated, since I have pretty much negative amounts of confidence on this particular piece.


End file.
